Dave Programming

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Yesterday I set up a basic account with nitrous.io. This gives me a virtual linux box with a selection of ready to go development environments. I decided on "go".

For a sample project I went through the tutorial web server that the golang folks provided :

http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/

I used the environment almost without modification. The only slight tweak that I applied was to get a new collection of vim runtime files using rsync ( as shown here: http://www.vim.org/runtime.php ) and add support for go ( as shown here: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/text-editors/vim/ ).

I was able to ssh into the nitrous.io box and use screen so that my working environment stayed alive even when the connection was broken. The nitrous.io environment provides several ports for the server to choose from to listen on. I was able to save my work in a git environment and clone the git tree back to my home machine.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

In the browser on your windows machine, go to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/tt-rss/install (substituting the appropriate IP address for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ) For example, I chose the address 192.168.1.131 so I navigate to 192.168.1.131/tt-rss/install as shown below. Click on "Test Configuration"

If everything has gone right up to now, you should see the page shown below. Click on the red "Initialize Database" button.

Now you should seen the page shown below in your browser. Click on "Save configuration" towards the bottom of the screen.

You should see the message shown below indicating that the configuration was successfully saved. Click on the blue "loading tt-rss now" link.

From here you should be able to login as "admin" with password "password". Change that password before setting up access over the internet.

From the "Preferences" option in the menu under Actions, you can create new users:

At this point, you should be able to verify that the apache2 server is running by entering the IP address of the Ubuntu virtual machine in a browser on your windows machine. You should see something like this:

To create a database user, ttrss_user, type

sudo -u postgres createuser -P -S -D -R -l ttrss_user

as shown in the window below:

To create a database, ttrss_db, belonging to the user, ttrss_user, type

sudo -u postgres createdb --owner=ttrss_user ttrss_db

as shown in the window below:

To download the tt-rss package, bring up firefox, go to the tt-rss.org site, right click on the download link, and copy the link address as indicated in the following window:

Then paste the link address into a shell window as an argument to wget to form the following command:

wget https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/archive/1.7.9.tar.gz

As of this writing ( 2013-06-06 ) this is the latest version of tt-rss but that will change in the future. Using a browser to get the download link should insure that you get the latest version.

This is shown in the window below:

The download will take a few minutes. When it is done, use the tar command to unpack the tar file as shown below:

Copy the directory that the tar package expands to to /var/www/tt-rss and change the owner/group

In 10 or 15 minutes you should see the following screen. Press the restart button.

( My computer seemed to get stuck either while shutting down or starting up but pressing "Enter" got past the hang ).

After the computer reboots, log in with the username/password you entered earlier.
Now press ctrl-alt-T to bring up a bash window.

At the bash shell enter:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

After a few minutes the upgrade should complete and your ubuntu installation will be up to date. If you repeat the above two commands the process should be much faster and cleaner. The result should look something like this:

Next, install ssh by entering:

sudo apt-get install ssh

To access the ubuntu server at a predictable location you will need to configure a static ip address for your network interface. If you don't do this, things will probably still work but you run the risk that at some point your ip address will change.

Select the "System Settings" button. This may be graphically compressed but if you move your mouse towards the bottom of the window it should expand.

In the "System Settings" window, select "Network"

Select "Options" in the Network menu.

Select the IPv4 Settings Tab and enter and IP address appropriate for static use. The DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are the Google public DNS servers and should work without problems. Save the new values, close the Network Connections window and minimize the VMware Player window.

You may need to specify that the IP address you chose for this machine is reserved and not available for dhcp assignment.

From this point on, configuration of the Ubuntu server will be done "remotely" from from the host windows machine.

A couple of days ago I installed a tiny-tiny-rss (tt-rss) server on a vmware virtual machine running Ubuntu. The virtual machine was running on a windows7 host. I also created a url that I was able to use to access the rss server from anywhere.

This was a reasonably straightforward process but along the way I ran into some minor roadblocks, all of which I eventually got past. I'm going to spell out in some detail what steps I went through for the benefit of anyone else who might want to do the same thing.

Although I was using a virtual machine to install my tt-rss server, these steps should work just fine for a normal, non-virtual ubuntu server. I this work using Ubuntu 13.04 which already has a version of tt-rss available via apt-get. However I found it easier to work with and configure the newest version of tt-rss from tt-rss.org rather than install tt-rss using apt-get.

It's probably not practical to actually run tt-rss on a virtual machine all the time but I did this as much as a learning process as anything else.